“I know, Mom,” Carly interrupted tersely, but she tried to soften her tone. It had made her feel like even more of a failure to call her parents and ask them for the money to change her ticket, but they’d helped her without hesitation, and she was grateful. “Coach isn’t so bad, really. And it’s a long flight no matter where you’re sitting.”
“Mmm,” Marlene replied doubtfully. Marlene Parker-Montgomery had never flown coach in her life, and she never would.
Timur drove them out of the clogged underpasses around the airport, and soon they were speeding along the highway toward Manhattan. Sunday night traffic was light, and Carly let her head fall back against the soft leather headrest, thinking that at least she’d be in her own bed in less than an hour. But when they arrived in the city, Timur turned uptown.
“Hang on,” Carly objected, as the car rolled in the wrong direction.
“I’m taking you home,” her mother said quickly.
“You mean to your home.Myhome is downtown,” Carly said. She just wanted to be alone in her little apartment. Dingy and inadequate as her parents clearly thought it was, it was hers. Well, it was her landlord’s, but the money on every single rent check was hers.
“Yes, to our home,” Marlene confirmed. “You can spend the night with us and go to your home tomorrow.”
“Mom, please, I really want to—”
“Caroline,” her mother interrupted crisply. “You called us from the other side of the world. You asked us for help for the first time in over a decade. You look as though you’ve spent the last two days crying. Something is obviously wrong. We are your parents. I am yourmother. I understand that you have some kind of allergy to accepting our money, but please, accept our hospitality. Your old room is all ready, and if you want to sneak out at dawn and disappear downtown, that’s your business. But I insist you come home with me tonight.”
Carly stared at her mother’s usually composed face, which was flushed with frustration, and found that she was too tired to argue. And that she didn’t want to argue, anyway. Her mother might not understand her, but she did love her. And when you loved someone, you wanted to help them. And it hurt when you couldn’t. She knew that all too well from spending years trying to help Heather see the truth about Jack.
Nick offered to help you the other night, a voice in her head reminded her, unhelpfully.He offered to help you even before you asked him.
She sighed and nodded. “Okay, Mom. Let’s go home.”
Nick could go fuck himself with a purple sparkly dilator.
When Carly woke up the next morning, she could feel every single one of the hours she’d spent in transit in her body. Her back ached, and her hip flexors felt as if they were wound too tightly for her to walk. She rolled over with a groan and pressed herself into the mattress, stretching out her lower back.
She could smell him. She could smell Nick’s spicy, citrusy scent in her childhood bedroom. She looked around the room, at the soaring ceiling, which was still painted to look like a calm blue sky full of fluffy clouds, a project her parents had commissioned for her eighth birthday. At the thick jacquard curtains around the bed, which they’d installed when she’d swooned over the curtained bed on stage the first time she’d seen NYB’s production ofRomeo and Juliet. And then down at the T-shirt she was wearing, the first garment she’d pulled out of her suitcase when she’d arrived here last night: the Leura House T-shirt.
For one long, weak moment, she looked down at the hideous stock art horses on her chest and let herself inhale the lingering notes of Nick that remained on the fabric. Let herself remember that exhausting, exhilarating night up in the Blue Mountains, when they’d mixed drinks all night, and he’d crept into bed and called her “ma puce.”My flea, literally. But really,my darling.
Except she wasn’t his darling. She was the jobless woman with a broken vagina that he’d lied to even as they’d been working together. Sleeping together.
She sat up and pulled the shirt over her head and threw it in the direction of her suitcase, but it slid under the ornate antique desk her parents had bought at Sotheby’s when she started junior high and started bringing homework home. She climbed out of bed and walked to the en suite to shower, not bothering to retrieve it.
When she padded down the hall and into the dining room half an hour later, she was greeted by the same sight that had started her mornings every day when she was growing up: her mother sitting at the long mahogany table, drinking coffee and reading theWall Street Journal. Marlene wasn’t yet dressed for the day, but she still looked impeccable in a cashmere lounge set and custom-made velvet house slippers. As long as Carly could remember, her mother had sat at this table and read the paper from start to finish before retreating to her dressing room and re-emerging looking chic and ready to start a day of board meetings, charity lunches, or appointments with art dealers or personal shoppers or who knew who else.
Carly paused in the doorway, watching her mother scan the pages and sip elegantly from her light-as-air porcelain cup. Marlene had red hair, too, though hers was darker and more subdued than Carly’s. For the last decade or so, grays had begun to creep in, and to Carly’s surprise, Marlene hadn’t tried to hide them. She hadn’t resorted to Botox or plastic surgery like so many of the wealthy women walking these streets, and as a result, she looked her age. When she frowned, her whole face moved and wrinkled, which was a rarity around here. As Carly watched, a frown appeared, and Marlene looked up from the paper.
“Good morning,” her mother said cautiously. “Are you hungry? Camille can make you something if you are.”
“I’m okay,” Carly shrugged. “But could I have some coffee?”
Marlene nodded and opened her mouth to call out to the chef, who was almost certainly working on dinner already.
“It’s fine, Mom, I’ll get it myself,” Carly said quickly.
“Of course you will,” she heard Marlene say under her breath as she headed for the kitchen.
When she returned a few minutes later with a comically small cup of coffee—what she wouldn’t give for a giant iced coffee right now, even an Australian one—her mother had finished with the real estate section and had moved on to the arts pages. Carly sat down as unobtrusively as she could and took a few careful sips, feeling, like she often had, as though she was too loud for this huge, quiet place, with its high ceilings and lush fabrics.
She took a few more sips and sighed, feeling the caffeine work its way into her system. At the sound, her mother looked up, and Carly was about to apologize for the disruption when Marlene spoke.
“You came back early.”
“Not that early, just … just a few days.” Just early enough to miss half of her best friend’s wedding and break her years-long streak of not asking her parents for help.
“What happened?” Maybe Marlene didn’t mean to sound disappointed, or accusing, but she definitely did.
